TASER

A taser (without capitalization) is a weapon firing barbs attached by wires to batteries, causing temporary paralysis. We have even turned it into a verb, as in "Don't tase me, bro!"

But I saw TASER listed as an acronym, so I did some digging about its origin.

Jack Cover, a NASA researcher, began developing the Taser in 1969 and completed the device in 1974. The "Taser Public Defender" used gunpowder as its propellant, which meant it was classified as a firearm in 1976. Later improvements by the company Taser International to make the "Air Taser," made the U.S. firearms regulator, the ATF, change the classification to it not being a firearm.

In 2003, Taser International released a new weapon called the Taser X26, which used "shaped pulse technology" and in 2009 they released the X3, which can fire three shots before reloading.

Much more interesting to me is that Jack Cover created the name of his weapon from from reading one of the popular, pulp-fiction novels about Tom Swift. Fictional character Tom Swift is the protagonist of a series of books that were similar to the later Hardy Boys but with Tom inventing what in the time would be considered science-fiction. I read a number of these books as a kid and recall his "electric rifle."

The electric rifle was a gun that fires bolts of electricity and could be calibrated to different levels of range, intensity and lethality. It could shoot through solid walls without leaving a hole, but also kill an animal or human. The globe of light that it shot was compared to ball lightning.

Jack Cover came up with TASER which stands for Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle. This refers to the weapons marketed by Taser International. That middle initial (the 'A') was not part of  Tom's name in the books, but added to created a pronounceable acronym.

"Police issue X26 TASER-white" by Junglecat - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

Sony

Companies and their trademarks and brands often have interesting origin stories.

Back in 1954, the first transistor radio appeared on the market. The transisitor itself had been invented in 1947 at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. They were a huge adavnce because they were small. They were a way to amplify signals and replaced fragile vacuum tubes, which were slow to warm up, and unreliable. 

They did not have an immediate impact on most because transistors had limited use for everyday consumers. They did have a big impact on military technology, telephone switching equipment, and hearing aids.

Bell Labs licensed the technology and the first company to market a transistor radio was Texas Instruments, But they did not pursue the market after that.

TR-55 Sony's first transistor radio - 1955

A Japanese company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo decided to make transistor radios their main enterprise. Their name was considered too difficult for the intended American audience to pronounce, so they decided to rebrand themselves with something simpler.

They looked up the Latin word for sound, which was sonus which reminded them of the English slang that was used in Japan to label exceptionally bright, promising boys - "sonny boys" - and settled on Sony as their new name.

Soon transistor radios were cheap and were snapped up by consumers, including a very lucrative and apprciative teenage audience. The transistor radio was the device to own in the late 1950s and 60s for a teen. It probably did a lot to move forward American rock and roll.

Sony went on to introduce a long line of milestone products including TVs, the VCR, Walkman, CD players and camcorders.

spiders online

Technology has pulled many new words from other fields, especially nature. I was looking through a book by Sue Thomas called Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace. It got me thinking about terms we use in new ways from technology. An example is the digital version of an ecosystem. Like a tree, that system has branching directories which all sprout from a deeply buried root folder.

Another reworked term from nature is the online use of spider. A spider is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. All the major search engines on the Web use these program. They are also appropriately known as web (more spider references) crawlers. (Also known as bots.)

lycosa tarantula

The origin seems natural if you consider the emergence of the World Wide Web (the www of many web addresses) from the Internet. But I find it a bit more interesting that one of the first search engines was named after the Lycosa kochii, or wolf spider.

That engine, Lycos, still exists at www.lycos.com/ in a very different incarnation. The engine was designed to imitate the spider’s habit of catching its prey by relentless pursuit.

Lycos, Inc. was established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos expanded, like many search services, to include email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. Lycos was the most visited online destination in the world in 1999, with a global presence in more than 40 countries. In 1996, the company completed the fastest IPO from inception to offering in NASDAQ history and the following year it became one of the first profitable Internet businesses in the world.

Cloud Nine

cumulonimbus cloud

You have probably heard of someone being "on cloud nine" as meaning being in a state of blissful happiness.

I never gave thought about its origin before, but I was reading about, oddly enough, contemplative prayer The Cloud of Unknowing) and a reference was made to cloud nine as something from Buddhism.

I have to say that my own associations with the term are more with the "psychedelic soul" song, "Cloud Nine," by The Temptations and the Cloud 9 album by George Harrison.

Looking for the etymology, I found most frequently references to Buddhism and to the study of clouds.

There is an actual (but old) International Cloud Atlas which defines types of cloud. (Not to be confused with Cloud Atlas: A Novel and the film version of the novel - both of which befuddled me.)  The atlas defines the ninth cloud as the cumulonimbus, which rises to 10 km (6.2 miles), the highest a cloud can be.

In Buddhism, it supposedly is a reference to the state of being that is the penultimate goal of the Bhodisattva.
A flaw in both these origins is that there are ten stages in the progress of the Bodhisattva, and there are actually ten levels of clouds.

Another reference is to in Dante's Paradise section of the Divine Comedy where the 9th level of heaven is closest to the Divine Presence, which itself dwells at the 10th and highest heaven.

In all three instances 9 is not the top.

Another pop culture reference I found is to a 1950s radio show called "Johnny Dollar" in which every time the hero was knocked unconscious he was transported to Cloud Nine. The 1950s fits in with the Cloud Atlas of that period, but there are earlier references to cloud nine.

I suppose that if the old atlas only had 9 levels, that may have influenced the usage. I can think of other "nine" references in our popular usage where the nine seems an odd choice. There is the 'whole nine yards' in American Football, where it is ten yards rather than nine that is a significant measure for a first down. And we also say someone is "dressed to the nines" as being very fancily dressed.

It seems that even earlier the phrase "head in the clouds" to mean a kind of dreaminess, induced by either intoxication or inspiration, was used. A 1935 directory of slang, The Underworld Speaks, gives the examples of "Cloud eight, befuddled on account of drinking too much liquor."

The Dictionary of American Slang (1960) might be the first printed definition of the term cloud nine as we use. At that point in time, the term had close association with the euphoria that is induced by alcohol and drugs.

Norman Conquest and English

A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, rallying Duke William's troops during the Battle of Hastings in 1066

It was on this day, September 28, 1066 that William the Conqueror of Normandy arrived on British soil. He defeated the British in the Battle of Hastings, and on Christmas Day, he was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey.

The reason I post it here is that it turned out to have a tremendous effect on the English language.

The British back then were speaking a combination of Saxon and Old Norse. The Normans spoke French. Over time, the languages blended, and as a result English became a language incredibly rich in synonyms.

Because the French speakers were aristocrats, the French words often became the fancy words for things. The Normans gave us “mansion”; the Saxons gave us “house.” The Normans gave us “beef”; the Saxons gave us, “cow.”

The English language has gone on accepting additions to its vocabulary ever since, and it now contains more than a million words, making it one of the most diverse languages on Earth.

Source: WritersAlmanac.org